jamie
Monday, July 8 2013
[16:13:09]
matt [wronka.org]/Lilith
Jamie, on her second Nexus phone tells me that over half the battery life in a day is par for the course, while I expected 2-3 days on the Nokia E6 with the same usage pattern.
Saturday, August 20 2011
[15:24:06]
matt [wronka.org]/Merch
Comcast no longer carries the DVR Jamie was leasing, so rather than fix or replace it, they offered to upgrade us to the current model at 1/3-off regular-price-and-a-half!
Wednesday, February 23 2011
Not Quite Ready For Prime Time Operating Systems
[16:17:33] matt [wronka.org]/Psi.dementia http://bohmian.org/disc/Google_Nexus_S_first_impressions
We just got Jamie's Android phone in the mail yesterday, the venerable Google-branded Nexus S--currently the state-of-the-art in Android phones.
It's not immediately obvious how to get a calendar onto the device.
[16:17:33] matt [wronka.org]/Psi.dementia http://bohmian.org/disc/Google_Nexus_S_first_impressions
We just got Jamie's Android phone in the mail yesterday, the venerable Google-branded Nexus S--currently the state-of-the-art in Android phones.
It's not immediately obvious how to get a calendar onto the device.
Wednesday, September 15 2010
[20:09:39]
matt [wronka.org]/Merch
Jamie tried talking to Comcast via the webchat on Monday to transfef her television package upstairs, but they ended-up being confused as to whether or not I had Comcast service already. Eventually we were told that we'd need to call, and ater doing so, reached a Texan-sounding voice that offered to merge the two accounts for just having me provide her name and my phone number. We're not quite sure yet what the result of that is.
Friday, July 9 2010
[00:29:44]
matt [wronka.org]/Merch
Jamie upgraded her EeePC yesterday from Karmic to Lucid. It went surprisingly smooth, although the EeePC ACPI scripts packqage is apparently broken (depends on ACPI-base or some other packqage is apparently broken (depends on ACPI-base or some other packqage that's not there, and wireless was broken. Looking on the webs; I found various people people saying that it didn't work out-of-the-box with "fixes" ranging from ndiswrapper to pulling source from version control. The latter seemed odd as it'd been working in Karmic. Finally a poster indicated that his problem was caused by the wireless card being disabled in the BIOS .... sure enough, rebooting and looking in the BIOS config it turned out that was what happened, oddly.
Tuesday, April 13 2010
Fancy Small Computers
[19:49:41] matt [wronka.org]/kerberos I remember a time, not so long ago, that it was difficult to find a small computer that was portable and had a long battery. The OQO looked intriguing, but it would continue to be vaporware for several years. The only thing I could find was the Fujitsu Lifebook P-series, which at the time was using the exciting new Transmeta Crusoe chips designed for energy efficiency. Unfortunately, even compared to the computers of the day, that laptop was slow.
These days "netbooks", much to the shagrin of Psion, are bountiful--often running on Intel's x86-compatible Atom processor, although increasingly running on ARM Snapdragons (supported by Maemo, Android, and Ubuntu Linux distributions among countless other variants). Jamie just got an Assus EeePC that's running Ubuntu; my mother has an Acer Aspire One running some MicroSoft version. I borrowed the EeePC and didn't want to give it back, it's really well done given a single-use mentality (the Netbook Remix variation of Ubuntu is very Mac-like).
The question I find myself pondering is what do I really want? I recently picked-up the Nokia N900 which runs at a decent clip, the Maemo 5 (Fremantle) interface is pretty snappy, and I've really gotten used to the touch interface for anything non-productive ("consumptive") tasks. It's actually a very amazing machine that in practice is very much like that P-2110 but smaller.
In the end there's a lot of small options, and they each have a different niche to fill--but I'm not sure how much overlap they all have. It could be that one covers too much of another's niche, making two distinct devices redundant. I can carry the N900 instead of the E61; but it doesn't replace the Neo when I need a small pocketable phone. I could carry the EeePC on trips where it would take-up less space than the MacBook, and still have a phenominal-for-a-laptop keyboard to compose messages or configure machines, or even do work albeit on a small screen. But what does that really get me? A slightly bigger screen (2") and a bigger keyboard, at the cost of another device--and one that doesn't have a ubiquitous Internet access at that.
If more areas had converted to municipal WiFi, it might be a different situation.
[19:49:41] matt [wronka.org]/kerberos I remember a time, not so long ago, that it was difficult to find a small computer that was portable and had a long battery. The OQO looked intriguing, but it would continue to be vaporware for several years. The only thing I could find was the Fujitsu Lifebook P-series, which at the time was using the exciting new Transmeta Crusoe chips designed for energy efficiency. Unfortunately, even compared to the computers of the day, that laptop was slow.
These days "netbooks", much to the shagrin of Psion, are bountiful--often running on Intel's x86-compatible Atom processor, although increasingly running on ARM Snapdragons (supported by Maemo, Android, and Ubuntu Linux distributions among countless other variants). Jamie just got an Assus EeePC that's running Ubuntu; my mother has an Acer Aspire One running some MicroSoft version. I borrowed the EeePC and didn't want to give it back, it's really well done given a single-use mentality (the Netbook Remix variation of Ubuntu is very Mac-like).
The question I find myself pondering is what do I really want? I recently picked-up the Nokia N900 which runs at a decent clip, the Maemo 5 (Fremantle) interface is pretty snappy, and I've really gotten used to the touch interface for anything non-productive ("consumptive") tasks. It's actually a very amazing machine that in practice is very much like that P-2110 but smaller.
In the end there's a lot of small options, and they each have a different niche to fill--but I'm not sure how much overlap they all have. It could be that one covers too much of another's niche, making two distinct devices redundant. I can carry the N900 instead of the E61; but it doesn't replace the Neo when I need a small pocketable phone. I could carry the EeePC on trips where it would take-up less space than the MacBook, and still have a phenominal-for-a-laptop keyboard to compose messages or configure machines, or even do work albeit on a small screen. But what does that really get me? A slightly bigger screen (2") and a bigger keyboard, at the cost of another device--and one that doesn't have a ubiquitous Internet access at that.
If more areas had converted to municipal WiFi, it might be a different situation.